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WordPress for Your Company Website

December 4, 2013

Are you still deciding what software to use to build your new company website? Still think that WordPress is just for publishing blogs? WordPress powers about 20 percent of all websites on the Internet, but you might be surprised to find that less than half of those are actually “just blogs.” The majority of websites powered by WordPress are actually sites using WordPress for full content management, not just for news updates. Here are some of the many reasons we recommend using WordPress for your company website.

It’s a publishing platform.

WordPress isn’t just designed for publishing posts, it also provides all of that power behind WYSWYG content editing, preview, categories, tags, password protection, and revisions in pages as well. It’s designed to manage any kind of content, not just posts.

For company websites, we suggest opening your “Reading” settings and switching to a static front page for a fully customized landing page, and if you’re not quite ready to also provide a “News” or “Blog” section on your website, you can even leave posts unassigned (to any page) to simply disable them altogether.

It’s secure and easy to update.

When a vulnerability is found within WordPress, it’s handled professionally and promptly fixed. That fix is automatically applied to your website over encrypted lines, so you can relax on vacation knowing your website is in good hands. Additionally, WordPress provides incredibly simple one-click updates to new versions of the software, and any installed plugins or themes.

Anyone in the company can manage content.

By default, WordPress comes with flexible admin, editor, and author roles that make it easy to progressively train new employees on how to write new content, and manage existing pages and posts in a professional manner. It’s possible to configure a full content review process that ensures nothing is published without proper authorization. The administration panel is also so easy to use, that bringing new employees on board and up to speed is trivial.

It’s highly extendable and customizable.

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, there’s a WordPress theme out there somewhere that was designed specifically with you in mind. We recommend checking out some of the professionally designed and well supported themes from the Mojo Marketplace, but there are also thousands of free themes on WordPress.org (many of them still useful for small business).

WordPress is optimized for search engines straight out of the gate, but it’s still possible to extend that functionality even further with various plugins when you require more critical control over those features for your company website. Plugins already exist for other functionality you might also need including social media integration, selling products, building an online community, adding site analytics, event registration and tracking, and just about anything else you can think of. Best of all, most of it is free.

When you grow, it grows with you.

WordPress is well known for its ability to scale up to even the kind of traffic that even sites like The New York Times, and CNN handle. It doesn’t matter how big your company grows, you’ll have the comfort of knowing that you will never need to figure out how to move to another piece of expensive software.

Hopefully this post has answered questions you may have about whether or not WordPress is the right platform for your site. Check back regularly for inside tips on WordPress and if you have any questions, let us know in the comments below or give us a call!

As part of the Open Source Outreach team at Bluehost, Bryan is a developer that works full-time on WordPress core, contributing patches, and providing support to the WordPress community. He is very passionate about open source software, has mentored students in the Google Summer of Code program many times, and is also an official developer on the wxWidgets open source project.